"The Plague of ‘Whiteness’"

"But hold on. Let’s not move too quickly to sense-making; as we’ll see, it isn’t always our ally... 

There is always a point in the life of white-supremacy and imperialism where the sense-making apparatuses breakdown. There is no mystery about the fact that US bombing raids, drone attacks, invasions, assassinations and so on always exceed any plausible strategic purpose. The occupation of Iraq was conducted as though, rather like Khalid Masood’s massacre, it was designed to thwart all strategic purposes. The destruction of the Iraqi state, the defiling of cities, the training and operation of death squads. Afghanistan, still rolling on, a war which saw even higher rates of aerial bombardments than in Iraq, with a statelet rump of warlords, patriarchs and religious fundamentalists mobilised in a war against other warlords, patriarchs and religious fundamentalists... 

In her updating of Fanon’s work, systematically deploying the Lacanian categories that Fanon himself occasionally alluded to, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks argues that what we call ‘whiteness’ is rooted in unconscious signifiers. What does this mean?

Well, you’ll have noticed how invisible whiteness often seems to be. Barbara Fields points out that we only tend to see race when a non-white subject is involved: that’s why there are scholars and black scholars, women and black women... 

the decline of traditional fathers and the heteronormative sexual relations that they prop up, is creating all sorts of chaos in the Kingdom of Oedipus. The idea that boys are destined to be men, and girls are destined for men, is disappearing. It’s no longer really clear who is supposed to be fucking whom... this is a situation that would tend to select for what Lacan called a psychotic structure, based on the foreclosure of law and limits. And without the paternal law to anchor experience, to give it a coherence and continuity, psychotic experience can be one of being bombarded, blasted, assailed by bits of reality, objects, voices, numbers, “incandescent alphabets” as Annie Rogers put it. The spontaneous self-cure for this is to create a delusion that somehow pulls all this together... 

If we rush to make sense of these things, we are unconsciously relying on the signifiers of race to do so. We are making things appear to make a spurious sense, covering over the disconnects and nonsense of this terrifying, chaotic global system, with the unwitting aid of whiteness. And that’s reconciling us, in a way, to a status quo that should horrify us."

http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/the-plague-of-whiteness/

FB: "whiteness promises an impossible fullness, an unreal plenitude of being. That’s what Seshadri-Crooks means in calling it a ‘phallic signifier’; it is the signifier that can say it all. The idea that one can have access to some maximum of enjoyment in the community of whiteness. Now, there’s something quite uncanny and frightening about the idea of absolute being, absolute enjoyment. It’s like this: if you have everything, you don’t want for anything; there’s nothing left to desire. Life becomes horrendous. Not only that, but insofar as limit is law in an anthropological sense, to be without limit is to be free to do anything: completely impossible as a basis for community. So, lack has to be restored somewhere, and it is restored in the signifier of blackness. And from within this binary, rooted in the unconscious, secretes racial fantasies, fantasies of lawless omnipotence, frontier fantasies, empire fantasies, slaveholder fantasies."